The durability of wokeness

In 2020, I wrote a column about wokeness, the view that group inequalities are intolerable evils, caused solely by institutionalized bigotry, that must urgently be extirpated. I said that its ambition and moralism allow no independent authorities or standards, and that made it a danger to the Church and Faith.

Since then, things appear to have moderated. The Trump administration has moved against DEI requirements. The Supreme Court has come out against a basic pillar of academic affirmative action programs, the use of race as a criterion in admissions. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now says that “Woke 1 was crazy.”

But have things really changed? The recent Jason Arday affair, which displays the continuing power of woke considerations in elite British academia—that is, among recognized custodians of the West’s highest intellectual aspirations—suggests that ultimately things have not changed much at all.

That seems right. The current understanding of justice demands that equal individuals and groups end up in equal positions. With that in mind, “wokeness” is a direct consequence of the egalitarian view that group differences do not contribute significantly to economic and social inequalities. On that view, an inequality like differences in the average pay of men and women is a systemic injustice that must be done away with.

It is very difficult to avoid that logic in today’s public life. Advancing the self-interest of each individual is what politics in a democratic consumer society claims to be about. In such a setting, how many politicians, who must offer something to everyone, are going to succeed for long by arguing that inequalities should not be addressed? Or saying the reason some groups don’t hold as many prestigious and lucrative positions is that they don’t have what it takes and don’t deserve them?

If someone in public life tries to oppose woke logic less confrontationally, and points out that statistical averages don’t imply much about individuals, or that diversity means people are different, different people pursue and excel at different things, and career success is not human worth, or if he just notes that everyone gains when the most capable and committed are allowed to succeed, he can be dismissed as an apologist for racism, sexism, white Christian nationalism, and so on. And if he calls for moderation and recognition of limits, he can be accused of criminal indifference stemming from a position of privilege.

Today, such polemical assertions have mostly given way to attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters. MAGA will end, though, and then people are likely to return to those polemics with renewed energy. Current trends in the Democratic Party certainly suggest as much. Some will once again find wokeness a source of easy moral superiority. Others will be good-hearted people who believe what recognized social authorities tell them and want to do the right thing.

And some will be politicians who draw political advantage from inflammatory woke rhetoric: in a mass democracy, ordinary people have little personal reason to care about public issues, so politicians are perpetually tempted to appeal to hatred, envy, resentment, and fear as motivators.

The most basic problem, though, is that our betters tend to be woke, at least in basic principle. The Pope himself suggests that equality is much more important than the sexual morality that has been a basic Christian concern since apostolic times. Nor is that just a one-off comment. Magnifica Humanitas, par. 79, calls for various forms of reparation in view of the continuing consequences of past exclusions and discriminations. These consequences will inevitably be held to include all present differences in outcome. So the paragraph can easily be read to support the whole woke agenda.

Such attitudes are natural under the present circumstances. The public necessity of espousing egalitarianism has caused it to take deep root in governmental and educational bureaucracies, and in the business bureaucracies that operate in the intellectual, cultural, and legal environment they create. People in responsible positions are required to speak in favor of it, and that becomes easier if they accept it as true. It also gains support from the technocratic tendency to understand people as interchangeable components in a global economic machine.

If wokeness is the natural consequence of propositions every respectable person agrees with publicly—and usually privately—what is wrong with it? Human affairs are infinitely complicated—and it may be that egalitarianism is ultimately correct. Certainly, it’s unlikely ever to be refuted to general satisfaction. So, in view of the sensitivity of the issue, most educated, intelligent, and well-intentioned people think it should be assumed true. What other view is possible in a diverse and prosperous mass democracy?

If something is viewed as an injustice, it seems something ought to be done about it. But there’s a practical problem in this case: differences in outcome are pervasive, and often large and resistant to change. What, exactly, are we supposed to do about them?

Jews, for example, are only 0.2% of the global population, but have received more than 20% of all Nobel prizes. What could—or should—be done about that? And there is the question of who gets blamed for crimes. FBI figures from 2025 attribute 88.5% of U.S. homicides to men, 55.3% to African Americans. Both percentages are grossly disproportionate. Does that mean the police should pursue Asian-American women much more than they do, since apparently they only arrest 10 or 20 of them a year for homicide?

Nor are such percentages improving from an egalitarian point of view. The proportion of Jewish Nobelists increased somewhat in this century. And during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the figures on black homicide became considerably worse both comparatively and absolutely.

There don’t seem to be many sensible and moderate measures that can much change such disparities. During the past 40 years, for example, attempts to close gaps in educational achievement have scored few successes. But when intended remedies fail, people turn to more radical ones. So extreme and even insane measures get seriously proposed, and in many cases pursued, by people in responsible positions: abolition of academic and scholarly standards, as in the Arday case, and radical weakening of the criminal justice system, through decriminalization, failure to prosecute, and serious proposals to abolish prisons and police.

The basic problem is that wokeness requires perpetual revolution, a continuing Year Zero that insists on endlessly reconstructing all social relations to achieve the ever-receding goal of equality. That process may proceed quickly or slowly, depending on the strength of the obstacles and resistance it meets. But given the logic of public thought, it’s hard to see why it should stop.

All this is part of what I’ve called Babel, the attempt to create a universal self-contained structure that promises to satisfy all human aspirations in accordance with the modern secular understanding of social justice. The attempt will inevitably fail, since the world goes its own way—and resists and often punishes attempts to make it do what we want. But it seems impossible to give it up because in a secular society, that would mean giving up hope in the midst of a very unsatisfactory world.

We have seen in the communist countries the ultimate result of making utopian dreams the basis of politics: a regime that covers the abject failure of its ambitions through tyranny, lies, corruption, and suppression of all honest discussion. That seems worth avoiding. So what can Catholics do to help modern politics get out of the black hole into which it is falling?

What would help, I think, is to weaken the dehumanizing obsession with wealth, power, equality, and the project of intentional social reconstruction. There are more important things, like carrying on a good life ourselves and in cooperation with the people with whom we are connected. If something like extreme poverty is blocking that for some people, that’s a serious concern. But is that true of equality as such, when ensuring it requires constant top-down interference with all human relationships?

With that in mind, the Church should break her growing alliance with secular visions of utopia, which have nothing to do with her mission as historically understood. Instead, she needs to present a more realistic picture of man as flawed and limited, and of society as a multilevel, multi-centered, and extremely complex growth rather than a construction.

She also needs to present a vision of man as a being not limited to this world, and of the good life as something more complex and sustaining than a life of equal satisfaction carried on within a managed global order. If such views became widespread, politics would have a chance of becoming once again something other than an endless fight over who gets what.

Only the Church has the intellectual and spiritual resources to do that in a world that desperately needs it. If she wants to contribute to social improvement, why isn’t that the obvious way to do so?